Search Inside Yourself

Version 0.1

Notes and email related to Search Inside Yourself (leftover as a draft review long ago)

Journaling communication exercise for Saturday September 6 today I'm going to talk about the book search inside yourself by Google employee number 107 I found it a very interesting book quickly car interested in it so I think that means my mind state is basically in a tune with the authors way of thinking. Yonkers with thinking. I don't quite by into the value a sinus to additional meditation practice, but a lot of his exercises and ideas seen very sound. He seemed crisis here, but it's hard to take am seriously in conjunction okay the context the way to google is your fault over the years. He's been teaching this course since about 2007 didn't even showing move from engineering work them, this looks pretty annoying. over to the personal section. Los several attempts to dictate more material. Anyway, the objective shirley appears to be to clarify my thinking in a b c a natural topic of journal activities would be the latest book 7 reading. My approach is going to be too dictated into Android, and then paste it into some kind of blog web page, editing. My feeling is I want to keep this kind of disassociated from my name, I'm not sure why. Perhaps a new blog over on WordPress rather than part of my existing blogs. Yes it's an estimate consciousness for now. Arapaho september 6

Since you closed Search Inside Yourself with a quotey thing, I feel I should open with a philosophic bauble whose origins are lost in the distant mists of time:

The past is fixed. The future does not begin tomorrow--it begins in the next instant. I stand in the cusp of now. Now I can make a thousand choices, each of which leads down a different path. Only one is the way to Tao. But regardless of my choice, the path of Tao is still before me. On my way, I met a man and asked him which was the path to Tao.

But the Master replied, "You can't get there from here."

I suspect the master was misquoted. He probably said "You can't get here from there" or, in accord with your book, "We can't get there from here." Or maybe that's just an allergic reaction to first awakening after finishing your book and sleeping on it?

Your book implied that your first language is not English, so you may not be familiar with the predecessor joke. I'm sure you can google it from the punchline, or I can explain it. Of course, if I tell you, then I have to kill the humor being. (Since my Zen collapse, it seems everything is also a joke.)

Anyway, my primary reaction was "So if he's sincere about training compassion, and since games are the most effective training mechanisms, and since games often induce quasi- or pseudo- or semi-meditative states of contemplation, where is Compassion, the training game?" The first person shooter of compassion? (Me? Can't stand FPSs, but Compassion is different, eh?)

Seems intuitively obvious enough for the most casual observer, but again, feel free to ask for clarification if required.

Having said that, I'm quite dubious about communicating with you. Your book certainly makes you seem like a nice guy, but the overwhelming evidence of the google is that you must be faking.

By the way (and way too far, too), I'm not really blaming the google. It's just that the rules of the business game in America worship cancer. Natural result of being legislated and regulated by the most cheaply bribed politicians working for the greediest and least ethical businessmen. The super-rich are different from you (I hope) and me. They love money much more, and that's how they became so stinking rich. Unfortunately, their problem is uninteresting because it is not solvable. The problems of a rich bastard who desperately needs more money cannot be solved by ANY amount of money. Meaningful problems should be viewed in terms of solutions.

Oh yeah, where did the bauble come from? Maybe you can google it? I found it in a little pocket notebook I used to carry, into which it had been copied from an earlier notebook, which had come from an earlier notebook, and back into the mists. I suspect it is my own thought, but if so, the prior question is what provoked me to think of it? If not, I wish I had noted the source.

P.S. You probably know Hal Varian (unless his title is just a sinecure). I was reminded of his contact invitation when my first search for you failed. You aren't using Google+, but he is, which is presumably the source of the fake LinkedIn account in his name. I'm pert' shure he isn't looking for me to discuss "Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite!" (Cf. Your page 135, which just missed the magic number of 137.) Pert' shure he isn't actually using Google+, either, since I used that link to let him know about the theft of his identity some months ago, and the fake LinkedIn account is still there and inviting me, for whatever nefarious purposes I know not.

P.P.S. Do you know Salikh in Japan?

P.P.P.S. I also hope this email bounces from a celebrity email system. Not to benefit the google, but for world peace and because it would help solve the spam problem. ROFLMAO.

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Freedom = (Meaningful + Unconstrained) Choice ≠ Beer

Version 0.5

ECAL as the answer to Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas

An interesting attempt to explain some philanthropy and certain aspects of Trumpism, but I have to reframe it in terms of ECAL, which is derived from my my old idea that most people don't want to be too free or to do too much hard work for the sake of creativity. Also elements of the problems of scale, whereas the book incorrectly assumes scaleable solutions are actually solutions rather than new problems and the sources of more failure. In my frameworks, the basic idea of this book is that "successful" people think the solution to the world's problem is sharing the opportunity to be successful with more people, and the reason their approach failed so spectacularly in 2016 with the rise of Trumpism and in such cases as Brexit is simply that most people do not want that form of success.

Upon reflection, I would describe it as the ECAL problem. Yes, it's a constructed mnemonic device, easy to remember as "lace" backwards, but I think it captures the key problems. It stands for Effort, Creativity, Ambition, and Luck, and the successful philanthropists don't understand ECAL as the source of their "success" and especially don't understand why other people wouldn't want that. In the worst cases, they will even admit that they regard the less successful people as "losers" even if they have "good excuses" for wallowing around at the bottom.

A few clarifications seem necessary. Effort is intended broadly, but mostly as sustained effort to stay in the competition. Though Creativity may require effort, some people (maybe even including yours truly) can spawn new ideas easily and the new ideas are crucial to finding new ways to succeed, but there needs to be effort to work out the bugs. (This is actually a link to the idea of programming as meta-thinking.) The Ambition should probably go first, in accord with my old joke about "Knowing what you want and wanting it badly are much important than knowing how to get it." It could also be reworded as avarice, greed, or lust, but I went with Ambition because the connotations are more neutral. Finally, Luck is the one the successful people usually don't like to acknowledge because it negates everything else, including intelligence and good timing. There are always other people who failed even with ECA because the L went to someone else.

Anyway, it was a good book and I can recommend it. Quite thought provoking, but rather difficult to obtain around here.

Let me repeat that I currently regard this blog as a collection of random notes that no one reads. If anyone actually showed any interest (most obviously manifested as questions in the comments), I could flesh them out.

Part 2:

Important aspect I should have mentioned involves the scale of [social] critics to thought leaders. [At least I don't remember "social" being used in that context in the book.] Similarities, but the difference in attitude results in acceptance of the thought leaders (at places like TED), but with the risk of their ideas (about solutions to the problems) being diluted, subverted, or even polluted, while the critics get "not so much". In the form of a sad little rhyme, the social critics are abhorred (or ignored or both or worse) while the thought leaders are adored.

Then as I was finishing the book I realized there was a different model that should have been mentioned in the book. It's the indulgences, stupid! What the rich philanthropists are doing is basically identical with the purchase of indulgences from the Catholic Church. The giant and cancerous corporations have committed huge crimes, even sins, but the main beneficiaries are the rich (if transient) owners of the cancers who are seeking to buy redemption with minor donations to "good" causes.

Extreme example in the news recently (as of 2019-3-26) involves the incredibly rich family that owns, among other companies, Krispy Kreme Donuts. It is being reported that some of their seed capital turns out to be slightly tainted. Nazi money. Whoops, more than a slight taint, eh? So their solution is a charitable donation of $11 million. Sounds pretty great, huh? Not exactly when the family's wealth is in the billions of dollars.

In terms of solutions, the book talks about B (as in beneficial) corporations as a solution, but I think that is a kind of bandage on the cancer. The underlying problem remains that the corporate cancers are focused on the single dimension of profit, and reality must not and cannot be reduced to a single dimension. (Interesting parallel arguments in The Gene, which I'm also reading just now. Evolution is intrinsically multidimensional.) I'm not clear if charity share brokerages would offer a better solution approach, but I'm definitely not convinced that B corporations are helping. Just another form of indulgence, they seem to me.

Part 3 is just noting some names, since I have to return the book now.

Mostly Lynn Nesbitt the agent who might refer me to a beginning agent suiting my own status? Key philanthropists and thought leaders might be Sean Hinton, Amy Cuddy, Sonal Sha, Andrew Kassoy, and Laurie Tisch.

Part 4 to follow is about the obvious comparisons with what indulgences led to.

Version 0.2

Trumpian Invasions from the Past in Sun Tzu Was a Sissy by Stanley Bing (Gil Schwartz)

Another pre-Trump book with Trumpian intrusions, but more than most such encounters. The book itself is a kind of light satire and actually motivated me to read Sun Tzu's original book (which is not long by today's standards), but mostly it's just a lot of tongue-in-cheek jokes. What strikes me about so many of the books I've read since Trump suddenly seemed to matter is how much of "the environment" he had becomes, and this book is an especially poignant reminder of that age of innocence, when Trump was just funny background noise.

So here's the list of cameos:

On page xxv in the introduction he presents a little ontology of wars with one bullet point: "Total conflagration: Donald Trump wants the ground your business is sitting on. Microsoft likes the business you're in and wants to suck it all up for itself. The Wall Street Journal has..." That's between the entries for "Medium-sized War" and "Guerrilla War".

There's a big table of weapons on pages 66-7, where "Outright rudeness" is listed as a weapon that "May be Used Against..." various categories of people, but ending with "Donald Trump" as a singleton. Amusingly, this is a weapon that is "Not Advised Against" such categories as "elderly Republicans" and "Japanese businesspeople". The prior weapon is "Sarcasm", but it's more interesting that the next weapon is "Lying", which is probably Trump's favorite. Among other categories, lying is recommended against "people of the opposite sex you do not intend to see again, even by accident" and "any lawyer but your own". Obviously a problem for Trump since he lies even to his own lawyers.

On page 69 he has a list of people who weren't dead enough. After Hamlet's father (who came back as a ghost) and Napoleon (who escaped from his first exile) and before Slobodan Milošević (who died in 2006, about 2 years after the book was published), here comes Donald Trump with the notation "The big doofus just won't stay down."

On page 116 he is writing about potential discomfort enemies can cause. He presents a scale from "tiny" to "grotesquely Trumpian". An adjectival usage is rather rare.

On page 166 the page starts with a mention of Kim Jong Il, father of Trump's new buddy in North Korea, but the main reference is in the section numbered 12 about PR representatives. (As part of the parody of Sun Tzu's original book, this book also uses lots of small numbered sections.) The list of examples starts with "Jesus himself had the four apostles, plus ... Mel Gibson. Samual Johnson ... had ... Boswell...." and then "Trump has himself." I think this is actually talking about self-promotion, though we now know that Trump sometimes promoted himself by pretending to be someone else.

Finally, on page 195 is a final and weird appearance of Trump. The section is comparing the taste of victory to cheese. I really can't imagine what motivates this short paragraph: "A guy like Donald Trump has got to have a big, hearty cheese, a little smelly, a little sweet, that goes great with ham. Swiss, maybe. It's got holes in it." Maybe the joke has to do with the placement between cheddar and Limburger cheeses?

The other page that strongly struck me in this book was on page 29, where he refers to fake journalist and super-hypocrite Bill O'Reilly, which sound almost prophetic and also seems prophetically related to Trump's current attacks on real journalism. O'Reilly did as much as anyone to promote the "fake news".

More evidence of how Trump invaded the public consciousness long before anyone regarded his candidacy as anything but a sick joke. Too bad Trump lacks the capacity to laugh at himself. Just another part of why he can't learn from his mistakes.

The failure of conservative humor

As if more evidence was needed?

I don't actually read that many books of hard-core conservative persuasion. It's kind of amusing, since many of my personal principles and philosophies do seem conservative on their face, but today's so-called conservatives lie too much. Today's uninteresting example is Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards by P.J. O'Rourke. He's supposed to be a humorist of sorts, though a more apt description is "libertarian propagandist of little skill".

I've actually read 6 of his earlier books, so I have to count this book as being fooled for the 6th time and shame on me, but I keep hoping to learn something worth the time. After all, the whole point of REAL humor is to learn (in accord with my General Theory of Relatively Funny Stuff), but O'Rourke never fails to disappoint. There are some traces of interesting ideas buried in his stuff, but mostly he's just wasting my time with cheap sophistry. Almost done with this book and so far only detected one interesting thought: The distinction between negative and positive rights. The rest of it was fluff and piffle.

What finally provoked me enough to write this quasi-review was Chapter 8 in Part II. Just too perfect as an example of the intellectual dishonesty of the Libertarians. The premise is supposed to be that Part II is about solutions on an issue-by-issue basis. The ostensible issue of Chapter 8 is gun safety, but O'Rourke actually changes the subject to attack voting rights. It's supposed to be a parody, but it comes off as too sincere, almost a harbinger of the Bolshevik Republican policies of voter disenfranchisement. Actually I'm pretty sure those policies had started before the publication of this book, but either O'Rourke hadn't noticed or it's another example of his highly selective focus. Also a vicious focus in his unfunny personal attacks.

I'll go ahead and run through my earlier tags, though I was planning to discard the book without memory. On a page-based basis:

On page 11 (which is early in Chapter 2, dismissing Chapter 1 as an intro), I was struck by several items, such as the delusional attack against Richard Dawkins that only showed (1) O'Rourke hates Dawkins, and (2) O'Rourke hasn't read the book he's attacking. This page had a number of poorly written, false, and dumb things, but I keep reminding myself that O'Rourke will claim the "It's only a joke" defense, and only more so for his worst writing.

On page 13 I was offended by his joke about the Japanese word "jiyu" for one of the senses of freedom. The only things it showed are (1) racist viciousness, (2) ignorance of the Japanese language and indifference to the truth, and (3) ignorance of what "freedom" actually means--but that's only typical of Libertarian "thinking". The reality is that the Japanese word is about the sense of freedom where the cause of your actions is yourself. Also, I strongly suspect it's a word coined in China, not Japan.

Page 15 had some strikingly offensive personal attacks on the Clintons, but "It's just a joke" of some twisted flavor. A more substantive annoyance was the discussion of "intolerance" without any apparent knowledge of the Paradox of Tolerance. Add Popper's philosophy to the LONG list of important topics O'Rourke is ignorant of or chooses to ignore.

At this point I was already getting fed up and wanted to stop paying such close attention, but... On pages 42 and 43 he dragged Donald Trump into the picture. Really laughable dismissal considering how things have panned out. Most amusing quote must be "Every property he touches seems to go to hell" as he dismisses Trump's self-claimed wealth as a trick of "former Enron accountants". Words worth eating, if not well worth anything, eh?

On page 49 he brings the birthers into the discussion, though Trump doesn't get an explicit mention. The offensive aspect here is the link between birtherism and O'Rourke's own frequent and vicious and unjustified attacks on Barack Obama. Maybe there's some racism there, too, since on the next page (50) he also takes a cheap shot of some sort at Tiger Woods. At least I think it was supposed to be "Just a joke" of some sort. Maybe it was just broken by time? The joke seems to be implying that Woods could not keep a secret, so I'm guessing it had to do with his exposure as a philanderer and subsequent career collapse? Perhaps these things just seem less funny post-Trump-as-politician?

Speaking of narcissistic personality disorder, he actually cites the diagnostic criteria on page 70, but without reference to Trump. If he had mentioned Trump, then it would have looked as wise and prophetic as Harlan Ellison's prediction of the Reagan presidency in The Glass Teat.

Page 95 is the apex of his attacks on science. The only thing O'Rourke actually proves is that he has no idea of what science is about. Even less idea of how it works.

If there's any thoughtful or educational stuff in this book, then it's been shredded far above my poor power to unshred. Sometimes "It's just a joke" is no excuse.

Reaction to Beauty Pays

[Just a public copy of the email:]

Just finished your book Beauty Pays and feel like I have to comment, even though I can't say much that is good about it... Yes, it does have a lot of interesting data, including some that was new to me, and I'm interested in specialized branches of economics (though you didn't mention ekronomics), but the flaws were so overwhelming that I feel like I could write another book about the problems.

So let me first provide some easy outs and reasons to discount my negative reactions: I think you should probably just regard my comments as sour grapes related to my mostly worthless second degree from UT (Austin). Or maybe the sour grapes are related to my own physical appearance and generally bad attitude? Or maybe I was just put off by the excessively legalistic perspective, and more so when I discovered why in the footnotes?

However, your fundamental misconception of genetics was so bad that I can't stop myself from commenting about page 143. The genes come in PAIRS, and the genetic cookbook that is assembled in a fertilized egg has one half coming from each parent. The "half the genes" that come from the father will absolutely NOT "be the same regardless of the choice of the egg donor", but it will be a uniquely random mix of half of his genes in each instance. Ditto the mother, no matter how beautiful she is.

Some of the math involved in genetics is pretty basic, well below the level of the fancy equations of today's economists. However before I would spend more time on this topic, let me pose a challenge. Do you understand the genetic relevance of this algorithm and its result?

(1) Skip n/e.
(2) Accept the next outcome with a better score than any previous outcome.

That outcome has a 1/e probability of being the best outcome possible.

Just thought of one more good thing to say about your book. I like having my thoughts provoked, even though I favor positive provocations over negative. Your book qualifies as thought provoking.

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#1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Justified - Coerced) Choice{~5} ≠ (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)

It took me so long to learn patience that now I have no time to be patient!

Weapons of Math Destruction

Version 0.4

Review of and Reactions to Weapons of Mass Destruction by Cathy O'Neil

Quite a good book, though I have a number of nits to pick. Overall the book is worth reading and I'm glad to give it the same strong recommendation that led me to read it, but there are places where her focus seems too shortsighted, especially in terms of the underlying motivations of the problems.

The largest nit is probably the title, not so much directly, but as used in abbreviated form within the text. The title is actually catchy and provocative, though I think it falls short of witty. However, in the text it is reduced to WMD, and that's a serious problem because there is a competing and quite well established definition of WMD. Weapons of Mass Destruction are still a huge problem and frequently mentioned in the news and books. There are good reasons we read about WMDs, but that means that each time WMD appears in this book the reader has to stop and remember the crucial distinction here. Actually, it would be even worse if she had focused more on the mass destruction that can be caused by her WMDs. She didn't go that far in spite of her focus on the scalability of the the weapons. (There's a secondary problem that she probably couldn't have considered, but for Japanese readers in particular, the spoken words "math" and "mass" are hard to distinguish because Japanese does not use the "th" sound. In other words, to a Japanese ear, both "math" and "mass" sound like マス。)

The reading would have been much easier without the conflicting WMD references in the test. Perhaps WM for Weaponized Math or MWs for Math Weapons? The kind of math is actually limited to statistics, so another option could have been SWs for Statistical Weapons. Lots of possibilities beyond the catchy but conflicted WMDs. Just hard for me to recommend this book without a warning about being a more difficult read than it needs to be.

Now for my page-linked comments (though I resisted noting pages until I was halfway through):

On page  115 I was provoked by the passage "a quality computer, like an IBM Selectric", since that was a typewriter, not any type of computer. That was the reaction that went too far...

On page 130 she is talking about a blurred focus on "efficiency and profitability" without justifying the inclusion of efficiency. This reminded me of corporate cancerism, though without the clarify of the singular focus on profit that modern corporations claim they are legally required to pursue.

Page 134 starts considering the misguided destruction of public education in 1983, but I was mostly reminded of "Figures don't lie, but liars figure" and the book Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics from 1976. I felt she wasn't seeing the real problem because she wasn't considering the motivations. She is focused on the attacks on unionized teachers, but she didn't even consider why they would be targeted. I would actually agree that they were part of the motivation was that progressive teachers can encourage progress and change, and conservatives are fundamentally opposed to that, but I think she failed to see the larger attack in which public schools were divided and conquered. The result was a tiny division of good schools to keep up the hopes of the good teachers and the truly concerned parents, while the lion's share of public schools became obedience schools you wouldn't send your dog to. The underlying motive for this wholesale destruction was mostly to reduce property taxes, though the rich landowners were glad to use and exploit such public-school-haters as religious fanatics who had other reasons for wanting the public schools to be destroyed. Though she talks about problems with voting and democracy at various places in the book, she apparently doesn't see how the mushrooms were cultivated in those obedience schools so that Putin (with Trump's help) could harvest them as mushroom voters in 2016.

Page 136 on Simpson's Paradox was quite enlightening, but mostly a reminder of how liars figure. It doesn't matter what the data shows when there are external motivations driving the analysis and the desired outcomes have been predetermined. The liars will find some way to slice and dice it and they are probably planning to take the money and run before the suckers figure it out.

Page 143 was about selective treatment in call centers, and made me paranoid about how I get treated these days. Also reminded me of the extreme form practiced at Apple, where I believe they now block negative comments from even being posted in their discussion forums.

On page 146 she emphasized that it was wrong to study "How have people like you behaved in the past?" She said the ideal question would be "How have you behaved in the past?" Actually, the ideal question would be "How are you going to behave in the FUTURE?"

Page 162 is discussing insurance, but I felt there was general confusion. The basic problem is that it only makes mathematical sense to insure against unlikely events, not likely events. Trying to insure against inevitable events is a kind of oxymoron, because there can't be any profit there if all of the policy holders are guaranteed to collect at some point. They might as well save their money and cut out the insurance company overhead.

Page 180 is talking about viral encouragement of voting via Facebook, but mostly it sounds ridiculously naive in light of the 2016 election. There was no mention of Twitter in the book, either. Page 185 sounded even more naive when she says that she has "no evidence that the companies [Facebook and Google] are using their networks to cause harm." Page 186 sounds almost ridiculous when you consider how Trump just ignores all of the conflicts and counts on each of his contradictory tribes to believe he is telling that particular tribe the truth while lying to all of the others.

On page 205 she is talking about an "oath" that data scientists should take, but the notion seems completely implausible because of her own emphasis on scalability of the WMDs. If a WMD is scalable, then all it would take is one violator of the oath to render it useless. This reminded me again of the moral neutrality of the technology (though she didn't use that phraseology) while the people are going to use any technology for good or bad purposes.

山梨県のひみつ

Not an actual book review, but just a reactionary letter sent to the publishers of a book that especially annoyed me:

Again, my apologies for writing in English. My Japanese writing is poor, notwithstanding having read over 100 of your ひみつ books.

I just finished 山梨県のひみつ and I feel I have to say something. More so since I actually lived in Yamanashi many years ago.

The smallest problem is one that I've called to your attention before: Unreadable fonts. This is most often a problem with the まめちしき, especially the フリガナ where the little 〃 and ゜ can be hard to tell apart. However, this book had MANY pages of small print that made the problem much worse. I actually wound up running those pages through a high resolution scanner and displaying them full-screen on my 28-cm monitor, and even then they were barely readable in places.

That leads to the middling problem, which was the book took MUCH more effort than any previous volume of ANY of your series, which I've been reading for many years. In general, the ひみつ books are a pleasure to read, but this one was NOT. If you don't believe me (or if you don't care), then I strongly urge you to ask ANY of the children (your intended audience) who have actually read this volume.

Sometimes less is more, and in this volume there was LOTS of stuff that could have been cut, which also would have allowed you to use larger fonts for the remaining material while making the book more pleasant to read. For example, all of the America stuff was unimportant and distracting and should have been cut. The details hours and fees of the museums are not needed here, but if you insist, all of that stuff could have been reduced to a one-page table at the end of the book. Lots of unneeded redundancy, especially around the high-speed train.

Lastly, the big problem: I felt personally offended by the use of katakana for the Japanese words of the two American children. Hard to read and it feels downright racist, too. Perhaps the biggest difference between America and Japan is that Americans think that anyone can learn to speak English, while the Japanese think no one can learn to speak Japanese unless they are born Japanese.